In 2018, the Laravel framework will be the best open source PHP framework available, thanks to Taylor Otwell who developed this magical web framework.

In this post, we will talk about why we feel that Laravel is the best PHP framework in 2018. As of now, Laravel has 35,231 stars on GitHub.

Laravel's Great Features

Consistent Documentation:

All the releases of Laravel were developer friendly, i.e. whenever Taylor introduced a new version of Laravel, it was well documented. From a developer's point of view, it looks very familiar, meaning they can relate it to previous versions. The coding style and commenting abilities were very consistent and detailed.

Migrations:

The code representation of the database schema is known as Migration. Whenever a new developer comes onto our team, the Laravel development team doesn't need to do much in the way of explaining methods, sharing SQL dumps, etc. with the new developer. Thus, we're able to achieve a level of database consistency across the entire team.

Database Seeding:

This helps the developers by creating the dummy test data in the database. Developers use this feature for testing the API or web services. A library called Faker is used to seed the database with the test/dummy data, or, you can also say, ‘Fake’ data.

Articulate Syntax:

The Object Relational Mapping software (ORM) for the PHP Laravel framework is one of the best among all ORMs out there. The developers I've spoken with find this clean syntax very easy to understand.

Blade:

One of the rich template engines for Laravel is ‘Blade.’ The developers I've spoken with enjoy writing HTML code using Blade. It is very easy for the user to use or pick the exact syntax that they need.

Elixir:

To define basic Gulp tasks, Laravel Elixir provides a clean and fluent API for your application development. This supports the common preprocessors like CSS (Sass) and JavaScript (Webpack).

Laracasts:

A tutorial has been developed and maintained by Jeffery Way which helps other people who want to learn Laravel or want to be updated with the new code or syntaxes.

This tutorial is available in the video documentation of Laravel and the regular updating of syntax has been taken care of. This Laravel tutorial is called, ‘Laracasts.’

Authentication:

With the newest installation of Laravel, an improved authentication system has been implemented so that you do not need to write new authentication code for each new app you develop.

Pagination:

To build web and API services, the pagination feature is a great help for Laravel developers. It automatically paginates data from the database. This is one of the killer features of Laravel.